Digital Distribution This Winter Ahead of Remastered DVD Release

Sentai Filmworks proudly announces the company’s acquisition of distribution rights for the critically acclaimed animation masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata's adaptation of Nosaka Akiyuki's semi-autobiographical story of life in the wake of the the World War II firebombing of Japan. Digital distribution of the movie will begin through many outlets this winter, and a DVD of the digitally restored master will be in stores next year.

Sentai Filmwork describes the movie:

Grave of the Fireflies has been universally hailed as both an artistic and emotional tour de force, with famed critic Roger Ebert calling the feature “An emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation” and stating that “it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.” Sentai Filmworks is extraordinarily honored to have been given the privilege of handling the digitally restored version of one of the art of animation’s true crowning achievements.

As the Empire of the Sun crumbles upon itself and a rain of firebombs falls upon Japan, the final death march of a nation is echoed in millions of smaller tragedies. This is the story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, two children born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and now cast adrift in a world that lacks not the care to shelter them, but simply the resources. Forced to fend for themselves in the aftermath of fires that swept entire cities from the face of the earth, their doomed struggle is both a tribute to the human spirit and the stuff of nightmares. Beautiful, yet at times brutal and horrifying, it is a film that perhaps only the animated medium could render without completely overloading human senses, transforming the fog of war and the screams of the dying into what Ebert calls “visual poetry.”